This is another hdd repair bad sector repair case study, it’s one WD10EARS 1TB hdd. We wrote this case study not showing how powerful our tool is, but the most important is to demo how to diagnose one hdd in different methods and how to find out the solutions. A right way of thinking makes you more successful.

The user tried to use format with P-list to remove the bad sectors but after the format and scanned the hdd, there’re still a lot of bad sectors, full of green and read blocks.

At this time, the user tried to test the heads’ read and write abilities to see if it’s head problem. He went to the menu ‘FW Operations’-Head R/W Test.

The user found the head 0, 1, 2, 3 were in good status and the user used other methods to diagnose the hdd further.

Next the users went to try the tracks read and write and see if it’s normal. The user selected one track-track 25 to read and write to test and found the head 3 has a read error. This is not a big problem; Cause’ head 3 doesn’t control the firmware area while the head 0 and head 1 do.

Next the user knows that the servo adaptive modules can cause bad sectors too and therefore the user went to run ‘Servo Calibration’ which is used to regenerate the Servo adaptive modules. Users can reach this function by visiting the Selftest Optimize-Online ARCO-Servo Cal.

After Servo Calibration, the user considered optimizing all read channels so that the program can read better the hdd at a later step. This is what the ARCO 46 does. Before running ARCO 46, the user went to clear the ARCO 46 logs.

Because this hdd has 4 heads and therefore the log modules are module 2000, 2001, 2002 and 2003. The user went to manually clear these four log modules.

Next the user went to run ARCO 46 optimization.

After the ARCO 46 is finished, the user softreset the hdd, went to format with p-list again and the bad sectors were repaired and gone.